Contactless payments surge with Irish consumers spending more than €30 million a day
New figures suggest that Irish consumers are now spending more than €30 million a day through contactless payments.
Making just under two million contactless payments every day in March, digital payments have rapidly increased over the last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The new figures from the Banking and Payments Federation Ireland (BPFI) show that more than €948 million worth of contactless transactions were made in the month, with an increase of 72 per cent on March 2020.
In terms of quarterly, volumes rose 13 per cent year-on-year to €148.7 million between January and March, while values soared by 47 per cent to €2.3 billion.
Accounting for almost half of card spends in March were payments in stores or at other physical stations.
Chief executive of the BPFI, Brian Hayes, states that this increase was “phenomenal” and that the “pandemic has undoubtedly played a considerable role in driving this change in consumer behaviour.”
The month that saw the highest spend using contactless payments was December 2020, with €1.132 billion being spent and a total of 65.2 million transactions across the month.
In comparison, the lowest spending over the last year was recorded in April 2020, where €470 million worth of contactless payments were made – a total of 30.9 million transactions.
Are contactless payments the future?
While the world was slowly shifting to digital money regardless, Covid-19 accelerated this transition dramatically. Raised to facilitate social distancing, many businesses banned the use of cash entirely to reduce risk during the heights of the pandemic.
In both the UK and Ireland, ATM withdrawals fell by approximately 60 per cent during the lockdown last year.
These new findings for March 2021 suggest that this method is still rapidly expanding and the modern shift to digital transactions are very much here to stay.
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